Joseph C. Osborn

Associate Professor of Computer Science
Office:
113

United States

United States

With Pomona Since: 2018
  • Expertise

    Expertise

    Dr. Joseph C. Osborn (he/they) studies technical game design and artificial intelligence. Joseph is particularly interested in how game players and designers differently understand and conceptualize games and in building computational systems inspired by those cognitive processes. In recent years Joseph has collaborated on a large-scale platform for recording, sharing, and citing moments and performances of games for archival and scholarly use. They are also a competitive Splatoon 3 player.

    Areas of Expertise

    • Game Preservation
    • Game Design
    • Software Verification
    • Programming Languages
    • Software Engineering
  • Work

    Work

    Publications

    Kaltman, Eric, and Joseph Osborn. 2025. “Hypercitations of Historical Hypertexts: Two Case Studies in Electronic Literature.” In Proceedings of the 36th Acm Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, 113–17.

    Kaltman, Eric, and Joseph Osborn 2024. “The Potential of Cited Executable State for Software Object Access, Validation, and Research: A Preview of the GISST System.” In International Conference on Digital Preservation. (Best Paper Award).

    Kaltman, Eric, and Joseph Osborn. 2024. “Curating and Sharing Interactive Moments with GISST.” In Electronic Literature Organization Conference and Media Festival.

    Kaltman, Eric, and Joseph Osborn. 2019. “From the Presupposition of DOOM to the Manifestation of Code.” Digital Humanities Quarterly Volume 15, Issue 1.

    Publications with Students

    Osborn, J. C., K. Wieser ’24, and M. Brody ’26. 2024. “RetroFit: Post-Facto Accessibility for Retro Games.” In Foundations of Digital Games.

    C. Li '23, and J. C. Osborn. 2024. “Translating between Game Generators with Asterism and
    Ceptre.” In Workshop on Procedural Content Generation.

    Osborn, J. C., C. Li ’23, and K. Wieser ’24. 2021. “Asterism: Operational Logics as a Game Engines Engine.” In Workshop on Programming Languages and Interactivity.

    Osborn, J. C., A. Summerville, N. Dailey ’23, and S. Lim ’23. 2021. “MappyLand: Fast, Accurate Mapping for Console Games.” In Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference. (Best Paper Award)

    Sarkar, A., A. Summerville, S. Snodgrass, G. Bentley ’19, and J. C. Osborn. 2020. “Exploring Level Blending across Platformers via Paths and Affordances.” In Artificial Intelligence and Digital Entertainment Conference.

    C. Kim '22, J. Kim ’22, and J. C. Osborn. 2020. “Synthesizing Retro Game Screenshot Datasets for Sprite Detection.” In Workshop on Experimental AI in Games.

    G. Bentley '19, and J. C. Osborn. 2019. “The Videogame Affordances Corpus.” In Workshop on Experimental AI in Games.

     

  • Education

    Education

    Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Cruz

    M.F.A in Interactive Media, University of Southern California

    B.S. in Software Engineering and Computer Science (Double Major), Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)

  • Awards & Honors

    Awards & Honors

    Best Paper Award (The Potential of Cited Executable State for Software Object Access, Validation, and Research in the 2024 International Conference on Digital Preservation)

    2022–2024 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Level II) HAA-290396-23

    Best Paper Award (MappyLand: Fast, Accurate Mapping for Console Games in the 2021 Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital)